Ola: The historic day has come – after 13 years of hearing about it I finally gave in to the general pressure (except you, Bookstooge, I know you hate Evilreads with all your might – maybe with the exception of these nice end-year graphs and stats :D) and created a Goodreads account. You can find me here, and if you do, please say hello! 😀 I’ll be slowly trying to connect with ya’ll there, as well as add some stuff, one book at a time. I decided to try adding past reviews as well as upcoming ones, but we’ll see how that one goes as it already looks like a very time-consuming task ;).
Tag: reading
Wyrd & Wonder 2020
We decided to join the Wyrd & Wonder this year, to celebrate the fantastic along with so many of our friends 🙂 Thank you to Imyril, Lisa, and Jorie for organizing this wonderful bookish event. The annual fantasy blogstravaganza looks quite promising this year, so we’re looking forward to it!
Celebrating all things fantastic for us means mostly reading and reviewing fantasy books, but among our plans is also a tag or two – for example, the Fantasy Bucket List Book tag looks quite promising :). So, without further ado, our TBR for the coming month – not surprisingly, filled with fantasy books (though I do mean to smuggle Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun on it as well! :D)
The Finished Book Tag
First, a complaint. Bookstooge made me set up a LibraryThing account, and now I’m dedicating significant percentage of my free time into moving my catalogue there… I have to agree, it’s an excellent website, and so much fun 🙂 They even have some of my obscure Polish books in the database, although some I have to put in manually.
I did not have time to check the more advanced options, but this week I started adding 50-100 books a day and when I’m done I’ll look what more they have to offer.
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But that’s not the main topic of today.
Back in December we were tagged by the excellent Bookforager with The Finished Book Tag. It looked really interesting so added it to my list of tags I want to do someday, and here we are, only four months later 😉
Reading and blogging in 2018
1. Blog
What a year it has been! Both the Re-Enchantment blog and my reading habits have evolved. On the blog – a year of two-shots, discussions with old & new friends, at home (and in commute 😉 ) one of re-reads, non-fiction and a bit of classics. I was so busy working on my project to read more of these that I feel I should actually read more fantasy next year! Maybe it is time to finally get to Erikson? But I will also continue with this-wordly stuff 😉
My favourite Christmas present – fourth book in this wonderful Polish edition of Le Guin, this time – almost 1200 pages with Gifts, Voices, Powers, Always Coming Home and Changing Planes. They are really going for the whole set, I think 🙂
Starting with blog – it was a solid year for us. I only have WordPress stats, and Ola says it’s around the same numbers again on LinkedIn, but we’re at 5,780 views today, with 53 published posts. It’s not much more than 2016, our second best year, but then we had 103 posts – weren’t we diligent 😉 Even in 2017 we managed to write 72 posts, so there is a worrying trend, but I think an average of one post per week is sustainable, even with our other current commitments. All the posts – since Re-E’s start – have a total of 288,910 words together, that would be quite a long novel!
Gateway drugs to genre fiction
Quite a big part of the enjoyment I get from genre fiction, books, movies and often even music, is when I discover the connections and inspiration. It’ a very rewarding experience, and the motivation behind my ongoing project to familiarise myself with the great classics of fantasy and s/f. It’s great, but it is also quite hermetic. It’s hard to discuss such things with the uninitiated. I find it easier to devise long term plans to hook my nieces on genre than to recommend something to a mature reader/viewer who might be open to some light genre.
Lets make make it purely technical, not about the importance of keeping an open mind and appreciating people with other hobbies, different cultural needs etc. 😉 It’s going to be strictly about the titles and techniques helpful to hook people on our stuff!
We’re also talking strictly adults here (and I mean mature readers, not necessarily readers over 18). Getting kids to enjoy genre is a different topic, something easier in my experience, and quite wonderful, but not what I want to explore today.